How to evict a family member

What happens when you have a family member living in your house and you want them to move out. Even though the family member is not paying rent, you still have to go through a formal eviction process if he or she won't move out voluntarily.

Attorney Tom Olsen: Another issue that arises pretty more often than people might think and that is you are trying to kick out some relation to you, whether it's one of your children or whether it's an uncle, they happen to be living in your house, they're not necessarily paying rent, but you're ready for them to be gone. How hard is it to get a relation out of your house?

Attorney Rob Solomon: Right. That is pretty typical. If the people have good hearts and they let their relatives in but the relatives often don't want to get out when the time comes for them to do so. There is a parallel proceeding and what's called an Illegal detainer action; which is almost exactly like an eviction except it's not an eviction because there was never rent. This was done out of the goodness of one's heart. It was done with the consent of the owner. When the consent was withdrawn, the tenant didn't depart.

We have a proceeding that accepts that as the underlying set of facts and allows you to proceed as if it was an eviction, as many of the same rules for eviction but the one exception being that you just need to give some notice that consent has been withdrawn. Courts typically say, "Please make that reasonable". Don't say, "You have to leave tomorrow". You don't have to give six months notice. But 30 days or something like that would be adequate to convince the court that you gave reasonable notice that consent was withdrawn.